In Forrest Tyler’s recent book, Developing prosocial communities across cultures, he recalls two experiences that he and his wife, Sandy, had in Colombia and India that illustrate the idea of prosocial communities and a key claim of this paper, which is the importance of listening to people’s own voices as they recount their strengths and their challenges. In the first, Forrest recalls the experience he and Sandy had in Colombia when they were asked to document the experience of Colombian street children in the children’s own words. These children were generally despised and marginalized. However, when asked to tell their stories, they told of a sense of themselves and their communities as being resourceful and of having strengths as a community. This was different than what the experts expected. As the Tylers experienced, “the experts viewpoints reflected only their own, discipline limited outlooks about the nature and capabilities of these children” (Tyler, 2007, p. 2).